Anyone who has read the book reviews on this site knows that we review more than books about planes, trains and automobiles. Often we go off the beaten path, as shown by the very first review, which was of Steven Tyler’s autobiography, “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” That’s because it was decided early on that car people are more well-rounded than their critics contend, and are interested in a variety of subjects. That, and we needed an outlet for all of the books we were reading on cross-country trips for new car launches.

One of the latest books, H.W. Brands’ The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S. Grant in War and Peace, was picked up on a whim at a discount store, and as a follow on to another discount bin find, Bruce Chadwick’s 1858: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War They Failed to See. This book set the stage, and painted many of the people enumerated (and the Democratic Party) in less than flattering colors. And though it did not deal with Grant in any real depth, it got me wondering if there wasn’t more to this Civil War general turned President of the United States than modern “consensus” history would have you believe.

Said history claims Grant was a drunkard whose administration was beset by scandals, and whose efforts to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution were the militaristic meanderings of one whose temperament was better suited to soldiering than governing. This is a damning claim for a man whom even his critics, if they are to be honest, must concede played a central role in saving the Union. He defeated secession and slavery during the war, guided the South back into the Union, and made that Union more secure than it might otherwise have been. Grant followed Andrew Johnson, and was a breath of fresh air. Johnson was a Tennessee Democrat chosen by Abraham Lincoln to be his vice president for the simple reason that it looked as if the Republicans might not with the 1864 election with Hannibal Hamlin by Lincoln's side. The Southern Democrat also was the first president to face impeachment. Yet Johnson , a rough-edged and suspicious — if not paranoid — man, nearly unwound all of the civil rights gains made after the war, and famously vetoed the Republican’s civil rights bill of 1866 that nullified the Southern black codes, guaranteed citizenship to freedmen and promised equality before the law. It took Grant, along with the Radical Republicans (whom history also has given a black eye) to push through the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and codify the freedmen’s citizenship in the former and his voting rights in the latter.

These amendments were central to Grant’s moral core, and he was not afraid to send out the military if necessary (and if a constitutional argument could be made for their deployment) to protect black citizens and office holders from reprisals, thuggery and lynchings. Grant’s relationship with the various Indian tribes was similarly based on concern for his fellow man, and he strove mightily against the tide that saw natives settled and resettled as civilization moved west, and recently discovered natural resources (including gold) made Indian land more valuable. When he died from throat cancer on July 23, 1885, the country mourned as it hadn’t since the death of Abraham Lincoln 20 years before. (Ironically, General and Mrs. Grant were scheduled to attend the play at Ford’s Theater with the Lincolns on the night he was assassinated, and were visited by one of John Wilkes Booth’s accomplices earlier in the day. It was only Mrs. Grant’s insistence that they leave Washington that evening to see their children in Burlington, New Jersey where they were attending school, that prevented further tragedy.)

Unfortunately for Grant, Northern capitalist Republicans turned their backs on the party’s anti-slavery roots, which castrated the memory of Lincoln, and began to worship at the altar of J.P. Morgan. And while, as Brand says, “they didn’t actively embrace the Southern redefinition of the war and its aftermath (as a war over states’ rights and against the 'carnival of corruption' that was Reconstruction in their telling), they didn’t bother to dispute it. They transmuted the Fourteenth Amendment from a charter of citizenship rights into a guarantor of corporate rights; the Fifteenth Amendment they and their Souther allies-in-amnesia ignored.”

The Man Who Saved the Union is a masterful telling of an unsung and yet towering American hero whose memory has been ill-served by time and historians. H. W. Brands writes of Grant and his times sympathetically and clearly, with spare but descriptive prose, and fills in the gaps with remarkable nuggets rich in detail. Not only do you discover that Ulysses S. Grant was not his real name, you also learn that he was the only American president to street race (on his black horse) while stationed in Detroit, how he failed time and again at business, what he did to provide for his family after his two terms in office, and how Mark Twain ended up publishing his autobiography. This is a must read for everyone who thinks they know the history of the Civil War, civil rights, the history of our two major parties, the truth behind the 14th and 15th Amendments, and much more. H. W. Brands has done a service not only to the memory of Ulysses S. Grant, but to historical scholarship.